In "The School Children," Robinson returns to the alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines of the quintain to offer a final--and strikingly optimistic--view of this expanding rural society in an industrial age.

In "The Human Race," appropriately written in tetrameter triplets that create a sense of speed and relentless repetition of activity, Wakefield captures the spirit of the age: "Along the brightly lighted hall / the timid workers scurry all / the way all day to duty's call / that puts its prod to everyone, / so back and forth the workers run/on errands that are never done[.

From the perspective of a hard modernist (like Imagist Pound) or hard postcolonial localist (like Brathwaite in the 1970s), McKay's use of tetrameter couplets in "The Apple-Woman's Complaint" can appear particularly constrained; one of the most popular poetic forms in English (a number of ballads by Burns and Kipling are in the form), their jingling regularities have made iambic tetrameter couplets particularly common in doggerel, and McKay's poem largely toes that metric line, deviating from perfect rhymed couplets of iambic tetrameter only occasionally.

He opened our Onegin Project seminar, which enrolled all our actors, student designers and stage managers, on the difference between Shakespearean iambic pentameter and Pushkin's tetrameter ("there's less space to move," he cautioned them, "but what glorious movement

This generic doubleness renders the poem's form similarly complex: the meter is highly varied, mixing pentameter, tetrameter, and adding lines in trochaic trimeter, giving the poem a vaguely classical cadence, and one exceedingly rare for a ballad.

In the first chapter, "The Rhythms of Poetry and Song," Malin offers a concise overview of poetic rhythms and meters before turning to a discussion of musical rhythm, in which he identifies a number of declamatory schemas commonly used by nineteenth-century composers to translate trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter poetic lines into a given musical meter.

Death is at the core of A Shropshire Lad and at the core of my attraction to the book--that, and hearing the tight, swinging cadences of iambic tetrameter turned to subject matter that I respected and had some use for.

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